Biography + weingarten violet

Includes the names: Viole Weingarten, Weingarten Violet

Birthdate

1915-02-23

Date of death

1976-07-17

Gender

female

Nationality

USA

Birthplace

San Francisco, California, USA

Place of death

New York, New York, USA

Cause of death

cancer

Places of residence

New York, New York, USA

Education

Cornell University

Occupations

journalist
memoirist
novelist
short story writer
children's book author

Organizations

Authors Guild
Phi Beta Kappa
PEN
Brooklyn Eagle

Short biography

Violet Weingarten, née Brown, was born in San Francisco, California, a daughter of William and Elvira Fleischman Brown. She grew up in New York City and graduated from Cornell University. She worked for more than 15 years as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, where she met her husband, Victor Weingarten, with whom she had two children. The couple would later be named as members of the Communist Party by reporter Winston Burdett in his 1955 testimony before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. Violet quit the pape

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“Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to mind it?” Violet Weingarten wonders after being told by an acquaintance–erroneously and spitefully–that her husband was having an affair while she is undergoing chemotherapy.

A few years later, Anne Lamott, watching as her father, writer Kenneth Lamott, was dying of cancer, went looking for books to help her understand what was happening. As she later wrote, “I found myself desperate for books that talked about cancer in a way that would both illuminate the experience and make me laugh.” The only one she found was Weingarten’s Intimations of Mortality. She was so struck by Weingarten’s candor and caustic humor that she used the question above as the epigraph to her book, in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994).

While many more books about the experience of being treated for cancer have been written since 1978, Intimations of Mortality remains worth rediscovering for the pleasures (and pains) of Violet Weingarten’s unique voice and perspective

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Depending on your perspective, Violet Weingarten’s debut novel, Mrs. Beneker (1967) is outdated or timeless. Mr. and Mrs. Beneker could live next door to half of John Cheever’s characters or across the street from Rob and Laura Petrie. She picks up Mr. Beneker from the 6:23PM train to Westchester, takes an adult education class on comparative religions, worries about her son at Harvard and her daughter, pregnant and off to Egypt with her aid-organizer husband, and wishes she could land one of those highly-coveted volunteer jobs teaching reading to youngsters in Harlem. She did work, back in the late 1930s, when she was single, radical, and infatuated with her newspaper’s dashing red-headed star reporter, but now she is in something of a limbo, no longer in daily demand as a mother and too young to retire to Florida like her parents.

She spends much of her time watching and weighing the world around her–both refining her public persona and wondering at its ludicrousness:

She reached over and patted Mr. Beneker’s hand, perfectly aware she was doing